Battlefield 3 Open Beta Performance and Image Quality @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Battlefield 3 Open Beta Performance and Image Quality - The limited time open beta for Battlefield 3 started last week, and we've spent some time with it. Performance is quite a wild ride in this beta, and it doesn't even have the full graphics the retail version will, but we'll examine it closely to show you how your video cards might stack up when Battlefield 3 finally launches in a few weeks.
 
Thanks Brent/Kyle/Mark :) Nice preview. Pretty much consistent with what I experienced with my 570. I wonder how it will be when all the graphical features have been added... :eek:

Could you contact Dice regarding the high GPU memory usage? Many are trying to prepare for the BF3 release later this month and people are insecure about how much GFX memory they need for different resolutions (up to Eyefinity/surround).
 
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In a multiplayer only demo, the results are useless on a comparative basis, but they do give a rough idea of what to expect. At 2560x1600 performance is certainly rough on single cards. I assume Paris Metro was taken over Caspian Border due to server availability reasons, since the latter would be the better map to test, according to its graphical demand.
 
Correct. I was able to get into Operation Metro games with greater regularity.
 
Makes sense. When the full game's released though, I dread to think what performance is going to be like in the worst maps. This is one of the most demanding multiplayer games I've ever seen.
 
Caspian Border was so sweet that it was actually worth it to spend some time finding the correct password and playing it. I feel Caspian Border was very true to the old BF2 in regards to gameplay. :)
 
I think its interesting that your review is almost the opposite of what they said in pcper about the mid range cards. Ryan Shrout said that the game in unplayable with the 6870 at 1920x1200 and also said that the nvidia cards liek the GTX560 gave a better experience. I trust your reviews more than them though. As you use real world results And talk about all of the settings you use such as enebling/disabling AA. could I get 2AA with 4 or 8xAF with the 6870?

I have an Intel Corei7 960
12GB RAm
Asus Sabertooth X58
AMD 6870 1GB
1TB WD Black hard drive.
coolermaster case w closed loop liquid cooling. :eek:
 
Different sites take different ideas of 'playable' though. The frame rate of the HD6870 at 1920x1200 Ultra is only in the low 30s a lot of the time, which is fine for some, not for others, and they did have to disable AA entirely to get that far.
 
Most results from other sites show that BF3 seems to slightly prefer VLIW5 (which is why you see 5870s matching our outperforming 6950s). The 6870 is also VLIW5 which probably helps it a bit.
 
I am running 6950's in crossfire and I am constantly seeing 70+FPS
I was also surprised to see that 7 of my processors where running on my i7-980. when I did an alt-tab from full screen to check system performance.
 
I'm running 460's in SLI and the game is very smooth with everything maxed except AA, though I have post AA set to High. The primary issue I have is that the game is not yet optimized for 3 monitors. Even before pushing the graphic settings the game was completely unplayable for me when I enabled the 3 screens, also most of the UI elements (minimap, ammo counter, etc.) would not show up. Once I switched it to run on a single screen everything worked and the game ran smoothly.
 
SXO said:
I'm running 460's in SLI and the game is very smooth with everything maxed except AA, though I have post AA set to High. The primary issue I have is that the game is not yet optimized for 3 monitors. Even before pushing the graphic settings the game was completely unplayable for me when I enabled the 3 screens, also most of the UI elements (minimap, ammo counter, etc.) would not show up. Once I switched it to run on a single screen everything worked and the game ran smoothly.
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Well it would, because that's only one third of the pixels. That's not an optimisation problem, that's just your GPUs not being powerful enough. Two GTX460s are nowhere near enough to run the game on Ultra with three displays.
 
as for respawns, why didn't you use a recon and drop a respawn beacon? you will respawn on that beacon if you select "mobile respawn point" in the deployment screen after death...
 
Nice to see my investment of the 6990 will not dissapoint me. When I was running the beta at 1920x1200 I didn't experience any slowdown (to me). The only thing I noticed is that I suck at this game and died once I saw people! Heh.
 
motomonkey said:
as for respawns, why didn't you use a recon and drop a respawn beacon? you will respawn on that beacon if you select "mobile respawn point" in the deployment screen after death...
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Sounds like a good plan. Perhaps it is because I haven't play Battlefield online since 2142 (and even then not extensively), and the beta was only out for a day when I started testing (so I didn't have time to explore and test every feature as I do with retail games), but I didn't know that was an option. It's good to know for the future, but it probably wouldn't have done much to assuage the frustrations of the beta.
 
Did I miss any mention of the odd flashing of regions of your screen, kinda like a scan line refresh? Friend of mine mentioned it too so I think it was not just my machine.

...and I wont even start on non-graphic issues....:rolleyes:
 
weebling1 said:
Did I miss any mention of the odd flashing of regions of your screen, kinda like a scan line refresh? Friend of mine mentioned it too so I think it was not just my machine.

...and I wont even start on non-graphic issues....:rolleyes:
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I saw some smallish flickering a couple of times, but i wasn't able to intentionally reproduce it. It is beta, so some glitches and graphical artifacts are to be expected.
 
So my 5870's may actually do well in this game, SWEET!!

My current rig is

2600k @ 4400
8GB DDR3 1600
2 x 5870 1gb
5760x1200

Does anyone have a similar setup to give me an idea how I'll fair?
 
Mark_Warner said:
I saw some smallish flickering a couple of times, but i wasn't able to intentionally reproduce it. It is beta, so some glitches and graphical artifacts are to be expected.
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With only a month till retail you'd expect some of these bugs to not exist though. I know, I know it's BETA... but cmon falling through the maps, constant flashing... I mean big problems / glitches should already be fixed and they should be working on small bugs at this point. :rolleyes: Thats what worries me about this game.

I think they pulled it from Steam so that they could release it broken and expect to patch / fix it later. This way people can't pester steam for refunds and steam wont be pressuring them.
 
Omegas said:
So my 5870's may actually do well in this game, SWEET!!

My current rig is

2600k @ 4400
8GB DDR3 1600
2 x 5870 1gb
5760x1200

Does anyone have a similar setup to give me an idea how I'll fair?
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I'd anticipate an average frame rate of around 20, and a minimum frame rate of about 15, at that resolution with the highest detail the beta offers. With AA and HBAO disabled, you may get an average of 40-45 and a minimum of 25-30. You will likely run into video memory issues, however, which will see your frame rate lower than that.


dnottis said:
I think they pulled it from Steam so that they could release it broken and expect to patch / fix it later. This way people can't pester steam for refunds and steam wont be pressuring them.
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The game was not pulled from steam. The game will not be released on steam, due to its competition with EA Origin.
 
dnottis said:
With only a month till retail you'd expect some of these bugs to not exist though. I know, I know it's BETA... but cmon falling through the maps, constant flashing... I mean big problems / glitches should already be fixed and they should be working on small bugs at this point. :rolleyes: Thats what worries me about this game.
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I believe the public beta we played is an earlier beta version. Even when the public beta went live, the developers had a list of things that had already been fixed.

I certainly agree that, even as a beta, the game is in a pretty poor state. But it's beta, not RC.
 
Looks like the 6870 for me at 1680x1050. I may grab 1920x1200 in the future, but still not sure when that will happen. It will suffice at least at that resolution too.
 
The frostbite engine is very CPU hungry. I would love to see these tests run using faster I5 2500 or I7 2600 unit.

On one day, there is a front page editorial complaining about things not being featured in games for high end gamers (eyefinity support in Driver just the other day) but then you put out a preview using a 3.6 GHz 920.
 
The minimum requirements are RADEON 3000, 4000, 512mb.

I wonder wonder how it would look like on one of those.
My laptops got a 3450 256mb and game won t launch ://

stuck playing on the ps3 ...
 
The PS3 is a lot more powerful than a mobile HD3450 anyway, even if the game did load it'd look like crap compared to the PS3 version.
 
been playing the beta 2-3 rounds tops, because it heats up my rig like no other game has. just ordered 3xscythe 800rpm fans for the top of my case
 
Not sure how this works, but my computer (see sig) plays it at 1920x1200 on High perfectly fine. I was under the (mis)understanding that you would need a 6990 or something to max this game out. Eyefinity setups maybe but since I'm single monitor I'm impressed with how long my X2 has held in there without needing an upgrade. The day I have to play a game on Medium/Low then I'll have to open the wallet.
 
Betaboy1983 said:
Not sure how this works, but my computer (see sig) plays it at 1920x1200 on High perfectly fine. I was under the (mis)understanding that you would need a 6990 or something to max this game out. Eyefinity setups maybe but since I'm single monitor I'm impressed with how long my X2 has held in there without needing an upgrade. The day I have to play a game on Medium/Low then I'll have to open the wallet.
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You will want to upgrade to a quad core before a GPU anways. You will be CPU limited with a dual core. Welcome to the age of 4 cores.
 
You do need an HD6990 to max the game out at 1920x1200 and get a decent frame rate. With a few settings turned down though the HD4870X2 can manage it. The lack of DX11 probably helps you quite a lot.
 
lol ripped from Reddit

NSwQS.jpg
 
is this one of those games where playing with everything at low but with some AA gives you an advantage?
 
dnottis said:
You will want to upgrade to a quad core before a GPU anways. You will be CPU limited with a dual core. Welcome to the age of 4 cores.
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Yeah, but that means a bigger coin to drop. I think the wife would be pissed if I dropped the money on a whole new system. "Hang in there Hank!" Yeah, I call my computer Hank, he looks like a Hank though. :D
 
Betaboy1983 said:
Yeah, but that means a bigger coin to drop. I think the wife would be pissed if I dropped the money on a whole new system. "Hang in there Hank!" Yeah, I call my computer Hank, he looks like a Hank though. :D
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Grab a used Q9550 off the forums. Can upgrade to a quad for $150 ish easy

Seriously I went from 9550 to 860 to 2600k... there wasn't that much of a difference...
 
Was the 6950 a 1 gig version or a 2 gig version? Or did you test both and decide it didn't matter if you had 1 or 2?
 
samuelmorris said:
Well it would, because that's only one third of the pixels. That's not an optimisation problem, that's just your GPUs not being powerful enough. Two GTX460s are nowhere near enough to run the game on Ultra with three displays.
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It's important to read posts before responding. :rolleyes: I said I had tried the 3 monitors before trying to max settings. On the lower default settings the game should've ran smoothly or at least smoother especially considering I can max BC2 with full AA on all 3 screens and it runs like butter. I also mentioned the fact that the UI doesn't even work properly on the 3 screens hence the telltale mark of the game not having been optimized to work on such a setup yet.
 
What about midrange cards like GTX550Ti/6770? It would be also great to have performance tests of these cards.
 
We'll see what my frames look like when this game comes out, but I have a 955BE and 5970. GPU is probably bottlenecked by the CPU, but I'm seeing frames bounce all over the place on Metro. Had to bring the resolution down to 1920x1080 because 5760x1080 brought me into single-digit FPS begging for mercy. Almost time to build a new compy me thinks :(

Guess I'll wait for Bulldozer performance charts, choose between that and the i7-2600k, and try to get a tri-fire 6950/6970 solution or just suffer until the 7000 series comes out.
 
DMFD-Minister said:
Guess I'll wait for Bulldozer performance charts, choose between that and the i7-2600k, and try to get a tri-fire 6950/6970 solution or just suffer until the 7000 series comes out.
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Just go with a 2600k and save yourself a disappointing wait.
 
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